Off Topic

Mulan

This week my daughter Camila Daya and I watched two movies in Mandarin together, and also practiced children’s music a bit on our way to her gym classes.

We watched The Lion King dubbed in Mandarin for the fourth or fifth time and enjoyed it thoroughly, as always. The momentary inspiration for this selection was the fact that we are going to do a safari in South Africa next week, so seeing the animated lions and other animals helped us get excited.

Previously, when looking up Boonie Bears episodes, I chanced upon a feature-length Boonie Bears movie that I had not even previously heard of, so of course I downloaded it. It was the second movie we watched last week. There are no English subtitles, so we understood very little of the dialogue, but had a good time watching it. The plot is relatively easy to follow, of course. In addition, I was pleased on several occasions to pick out words I would not have understood a few months ago, and which helped me understand the storyline. Even my daughter, who has done only a third of my Mandarin viewing thus far, understood several words.

It took me a while to discover the title of the movie. Finally, Google told me it is a 2015 film called Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter. I didn’t find it as entertaining–and certainly not as funny–as last year’s Boonie Bears: To the Rescue. Nevertheless, there were touching moments, and I found the mystical aspects of it quirky but interesting.

On my way to the farm this weekend, I was very pleased to be able, for the first time, to sing along with Nan Zi Han from Mulan the whole way through. I have finally completed its memorization, after many months! So, my dear (and dwindling) readers, you can look forward to a new music video soon, hopefully in May, when we get back from Africa.

Tomorrow I begin my evening Law classes again at the University of Brasilia, after a two-year hiatus. On top of my demanding full-time job, work trips, language institute, farm and tree plantation, and lovely family, my schedule is a bit tight.

But I’m enjoying my Mandarin experiment immensely and there is no way I’m going to stop. I don’t even want to slow down. I intend to keep up my average 45 minutes per day.

Trying to fit so much into one’s day may reflect some underlying existential dilemma (actually, I’m pretty sure it does in my case), but it also takes planning, discipline, and creativity. No time can be wasted. That includes time behind the wheel. Fortunately, I don’t have a long commute, but driving to work and back twice a day and taking my daughter to the gym and school takes up a total of nearly one hour a day. On weekends, I spend at the very least three hours driving to get to my farm and then back to Brasilia.

When traffic permits (safety first, folks), I have been using that time to make hands-free calls (probably not the best idea), listen to spiritual music and talks, mentally plan projects for my language institute, and more recently listen to French radio broadcasts.

This imperative of efficiency has led me to make a significant change in my Mandarin experiment. I have increasingly incorporated listening to music into my “studies.” I have listened to music since early in my experiment, but initially only as it appeared in the videos I was watching anyway: mostly dubbed Disney movies, but also Boonie Bears and Qiao Hu.

I transitioned to using music as a deliberate learning tool when in June of last year I began repeating the video segment of Nan Zi Han (Make a Man Out of You) in the Chinese dub of Mulan, attempting to decipher and memorize the syllables. I made some progress, but it was extremely slow and I put that mini subproject on the backburner.

This year, I took up the Boonie Bears intro song, which is much shorter, and set out to learn it. That is when I started listening in the car for the sake of efficiency. I found that repeating single lines over and over again—sometimes actually turning the music off to better focus on memorizing lines—was at least as effective as watching the video endlessly. I found I was making good use of my time and advancing my learning process. I learned the entire song and made the infamous video of my daughter and me singing and dancing.

I then returned to Nan Zi Han, and I am slowly learning it, mostly while driving. Stay tuned for a much sillier home video, coming soon.

In the meantime, I chanced upon an awesome little album of Chinese children’s songs with a electronica accompaniment. It’s Little Dragon Tales by the Shanghai Restoration Project. I downloaded the album, which came with a pdf file that included the lyrics—in Chinese characters, pinyin, and English translation. The temptation was too great. Not only that—I’m fully convinced that using music for language acquisition is much more effective when one actually learns the lyrics. So I began peaking.

I now listen to Little Dragon Tales, the Boonie Bears song, and Nan Zi Han while driving. Obviously, this is exclusively oral (and mental). However, occasionally I will spend two or five minutes studying the lyrics to these songs (at zero miles per hour—no worries) to be sure I am getting the syllables more or less right, and that I have a general sense of the meaning of what I am singing.

So far, just 20 out of my 300 hours have been used for listening to music, but that proportion will increase over time. All told, approximately three of those hours have been spent while accessing the lyrics.

I have updated my Hypothesis and Methodology pages to include listening to music, which I had not thought of when I started my experiment. I am tracking the time I spend with music as carefully as my video-viewing time. When assessing my results at the end of this experiment, I will certainly take into account the use of music as well as the videos.

In sum, practical considerations, especially the imperative of efficiency, have trumped methodological purism and rigid attachment to rules. However, I believe listening to Chinese music is fully in the spirit of my experiment, even if critics will undoubtedly pounce on my use of lyrics (even though it accounts for 1% of my experiment time) to question its credibility.

When watching an entirely new episode of a soap opera (a genre I never ordinarily watch) without subtitles, be able to pick out and understand perhaps 15% of the words that are uttered (including repeats – each “wo”, “ni”, and “hao” counts hahaha) on first viewing. That may sound really easy and unambitious to more advanced students, but it would feel like a great accomplishment to me.

Be able to sing at least one entire song from the movies or shows that I watch. This has proven surprisingly difficult! I have worked a bit on the Boonie Bears’ intro song and a lot on Nan Zi Han from Mulan, but with little to show for it.

Be able to understand at least 50% of the dialogue in a new Boonie Bears or Qiao Hu episode and be able to watch at least one or two of my favorite Chinese movies such as Dragon and Hero and understand most of the dialogue without subtitles (after many, many repetitions).

Continue blogging about my experiment on a weekly basis and engage more with other students of Mandarin and language enthusiasts in general through my blog and on this and other forums.

My 15% comprehension goal (#3) is fairly ambitious, considering that my last self-assessment was 6%, and there is a tendency toward diminishing returns due to lower word frequency for new terms, once you get past pronouns, interjections, and basic verbs. However, I’m hoping that this phenomenon will be counterbalanced by increasingly reaping the fruits of natural neural adaptation to oral Mandarin, which I expect has occurred over the past year and 220 hours and will continue as my experiment progresses.

My fourth goal relates to using music as a language acquisition strategy. Authentic music and video are two common sources of listening practice for students that adhere, at least partially, to a natural acquisition strategy. I elected video rather than music for my experiment because I think it is generally superior and because the visual clues make deciphering words possible even at a basic level, whereas I might listen to music in Mandarin endlessly without learning anything if I used it exclusively.

However, the major advantage to song is that the accompanying music is conducive to repetition, memorization, and deep or subconscious assimilation. If a tune is catchy, you can listen to it again and again, sing along, and before long find yourself repeating it mentally or aloud on your own. Evidently, in this way, you are getting “extra” practice with the language (such as when you sing while in the shower). Further, you are assimilating the language on a different neurological level than when simply listening to dialogue.

I recommend students take the following measures to use music effectively for language acquisition:

– Choose songs that have meaningful, well-written lyrics. Get help from a native.

– Choose music that you really like and can listen to over and over with pleasure.

– Study the lyrics carefully.

– Memorize the lyrics, either deliberately or by listening to the song so many times that you learn them naturally.

– Once you learn it, sing the song from time to time! This should occur spontaneously, but if it doesn’t, make a point of it.

In my own Mandarin acquisition experiment, I cannot fully follow my own recommendations because I cannot study the lyrics or get help from natives. Obviously, however, I can use music, since it is often included in movies and TV shows. There is no reason that I cannot, as I watch, pay careful attention, repeat the tracks, and then try to sing along. As I mentioned, I have done that with the song Nan Zi Han from Mulan several times.

To date, I have probably spent a total of at least three hours on it. Surprisingly, I am still unable to sing along with even half the song!

More recently, I have been repeating the introductory song to the Boonie Bears episode. (Watch first 1:20)

I recently decided—in another flexible interpretation of my rules—that I will also listen to these songs in isolation, sans the video. I believe this makes little difference to my experiment, since this listening is unlikely to ever account for more than 5% or 10% of my total time. Further, this type of listening is even more, rather than less, radical than watching videos, since it is purely oral.

The reason for my decision is simple: I want to make better use of my time when driving. I drive three hours to my farm and back almost every weekend. I have recently started listening to downloaded French radio broadcasts during these drives and loved the experience. I realized I could use a bit of that time in the car to listen to Mandarin as well. Since I want to eventually memorize at least these two songs, I might as well make some progress while driving. I will carefully include this time in my daily Mandarin log.

This past week Camila Daya and I watched Beauty and the Beast dubbed in Mandarin twice (and she watched it couple of additional times in English). It’s a great learning source, just like The Little Mermaid, due to its high quality and “watchability”, the straightforward dialogues (not that I understand much of anything haha), and the catchy songs. On a side note, I noticed that buying some of these Mandarin-language Disney DVDs would be a good way to circumvent the lack of availability of Disney classics for regular purchase or legal download, since they have an English language option. I had tried buying Beauty and the Beast in the past for my daughter (regular edition, in English), but it seems to be a Disney marketing strategy to keep them off the market for long periods.

I also watched a new Chinese movie, Shanghai Triad. It’s an excellent movie and I would highly recommend it, as long as you’re not looking for something to lift your spirits or restore your faith in humanity. Set in 1930s Shanghai, it’s an authentic Chinese gangster movie with some interesting twists. It’s a different style from any of the other Chinese movies I’ve seen to date and the first of this genre. I recognized the actress Gong Li from The Emperor and the Assassin and I subsequently realized I’ve also seen her in Farewell My Concubine and Memoirs of a Geisha (the Japanese movie). Gong Li is clearly one of China’s top actresses from the past three decades and I’m sure I’ll see a few more movies from her filmography in coming months.

Finally, I am persevering with THE SONG. Of course, I’m referring to Make a Man out of You, Mandarin version, from Mulan. I’m happy to report that after three hours of listening to it (over a few weeks) I can now sing along with six whole lines! I would have expected to take about 30 minutes to learn six lines. But no matter … I will stick with it. Who knows how awful my pronunciation may be, but it sounds okay to me! I can sing along to these five lines without missing a syllable. In the video above, I wasn’t very focused, so there are grosser mistakes.

I’ve watched very little Qiao Hu, which is what I should be doing, but I do get a few minutes in from time to time and you can look forward to a new study guide in August.

I will soon have completed 120 hours or 10% of my planned viewing time for the experiment, which will be my first big milestone. If I do that by next week, in my next post I hope to take stock of my progress and reflect on my hypothesis and way forward.